Former Pentagon Official Says All Chinese Electronics In The US Could Have Built-In Trapdoors

Clarke worked with four White House administrations during 30
years of government service before opening his own cybersecurity
firm in the corridors of Arlington, Va outside the nation's
capital.

He was at the State Department, the Department of Defense, has a
master's Degree from MIT and was the Bush counter-terrorism guy
who told the White House that al Qaeda was plotting a grand
attack on American soil in the weeks leading up to 9/11.

After the attack, Clarke sat before the 9/11 commission and told
them directly: "Your government failed you."

Clarke recently spoke to
Ron Rosenbaum at Smithsonian Magazine and told him the
government is slipping up again, that while we now have the
ability to coordinate a successful cyberwar, like slipping the
Stuxnet virus into Iran's nuclear system, the U.S. has absolutely
no cyber defenses.

Which is a bad thing for a superpower that gets the lionshare of
its electronic components, both civilian and military from China,
one of its biggest global adversaries.

He believes the Chinese, already known for their industrial
espionage, and electronic subterfuge, have built "logic
bombs," "Trojan horses," and trapdoors into all manner of
electronic components that could be activated at a moments
notice, sending a digital apocalypse to the U.S. military with a
few simple keystrokes.

“My greatest fear,” Clarke says, “is that, rather than having
a cyber-Pearl Harbor event, we will instead have this death of a
thousand cuts. Where we lose our competitiveness by having all
of our research and development stolen by the Chinese. And we
never really see the single event that makes us do something
about it. That it’s always just below our pain threshold. That
company after company in the United States spends millions,
hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars on
R&D and that information goes free to China....After a while
you can’t compete.”

But Clarke’s concerns reach beyond the cost of lost
intellectual property. He foresees the loss of military
power. Say there was another confrontation, such as the one
in 1996 when President Clinton rushed two carrier battle fleets
to the Taiwan Strait to warn China against an invasion of Taiwan.
Clarke, who says there have been war games on precisely such a
revived confrontation, now believes that we might be forced to
give up playing such a role for fear that our carrier group
defenses could be blinded and paralyzed by Chinese
cyberintervention. (He cites a recent war game published in
an influential military strategy journal
called Orbis titled “How the U.S. Lost the Naval War of
2015.”)

That 1995 show of force in the Taiwan Strait was the single
largest display of U.S. military power in the region since the
Vietnam War . Today, with the U.S. pivoting back to the region
after a decade of war in the Middle East, it faces an incredibly
wealthy China that's spending heavily on an extensive military
force.

So while it may seem like Clarke could just be trying to drum up
business, the question remains why wouldn't China do
this to give itself the advantage in a face-off with the U.S.
military?

China writes the book on corporate espionage, and if the U.S.
is foolish enough to create weapons it could use against the PRC
with Chinese made electronics, then who would be the bigger fool:
the U.S. for buying them, or the Chinese for not building-in a
solution to neutralize its adversary?